The lack of preparation for war has its price. Will Canada have to pay it again?

Just over 18 years ago, amid the dust and scorching heat of Kandahar Airfield, the weary look on Col. Ian Hope’s face spoke louder than his words.

It was the spring of 2006, and the Canadian contingent in Afghanistan had just come through a brutal few weeks. More than half a dozen Canadian soldiers had been killed in roadside bombings. As it turned out, this was the beginning of a bloody, unstoppable wave of casualties that would shake the heart of a nation and set the political agenda in ways the then Conservative government never expected.

Hope, then the astute and well-read commander of a combat group, privately pleaded with a journalist returning to Ottawa to bring him helicopters because “people are dying here on the streets because there are so few of them.”

The army received these helicopters – two years and nearly 100 dead soldiers later – after a lengthy political and institutional debate in which an independent panel essentially told the federal government to either adequately equip the army or withdraw from Kandahar.

This is the kind of profound life experience that the country’s former top military commander politely expressed in his farewell speech this week.

“Our military history is marked by a lack of preparation at the start of a war… 1914, 1939, 1950 and 2001 are all glaring examples of this. Let us not allow this to happen again,” said soon-to-be-retired General Wayne Eyre. “We must act quickly.”

WATCH: General Wayne Eyre denounces Canada’s habit of being unprepared for war

“There is a need for urgency,” says outgoing Chief of Staff Wayne Eyre on the war between Russia and Ukraine

In his final remarks as Chief of Staff of the Canadian Armed Forces, General Wayne Eyre said that “evil walks this earth” and called on Canada to continue supporting the defence of Ukraine.

Whether his appeal will be understood – or will once again fall on deaf ears – remains to be seen.

It is almost a cliché to say that important political debates in Ottawa take place in an abstract vacuum, with little sense of urgency or even realism.

But the lack of preparation for war comes at a price: human losses that are rarely discussed in Ottawa – especially not in the debate about whether Canada can or should meet NATO’s benchmark for defence spending for allies of two per cent of national gross domestic product.

At the recent NATO summit in Washington, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau committed to meeting the spending target by 2032. He also called the two percent figure a “crass mathematical calculation” that certain people (he did not say who) would be quick to invoke, and argued that it was not a true measure of a country’s defense commitment.

Fair enough.

Last winter, the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC concluded in an insightful study that the two percent mark “does not adequately capture the many different ways allies are deploying their resources on capabilities and programs that enhance transatlantic security broadly.”

The report argues that the NATO benchmark only captures individual states’ spending on their military capabilities and defense programs and that containing a resurgent Russia requires a whole-of-government approach – efforts that do not factor into the calculation.

Trying not to side too much with his boss, Defence Secretary Bill Blair quietly noted after the swearing-in of Eyre’s successor, General Jennie Carignan, that the two per cent was the figure everyone in NATO had agreed on and that it was currently the only yardstick they had.

“Two percent is a perfectly valid benchmark,” Blair said.

As a reminder (and it bears repeating), to meet the NATO target, Canada would need to spend between $60 billion and $64 billion annually on defence, given the size of its economy. Blair acknowledged that the Department of Defence is not currently equipped to absorb this amount.

“There was no way to actually spend the money,” he said, because there were not enough staff in procurement.

“I was not able to quickly acquire the skills that the Canadian Forces recognized.”

Conservative party leader Pierre Pollievre refused to commit to the NATO goal because he considers federal finances to be “a dumpster fire.” At the same time, however, he promised to provide the military with the necessary equipment and to crack down on “corruption, bureaucracy and procurement errors.”

This is the Conservative position, dating back at least to the party’s 2006 election platform. Several defence experts have noted that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government has often been frustrated by its inability to push through complex military procurements with fewer staff (and pay higher veterans benefits).

In his parting remarks, Eyre sought to steer the conversation away from political and mathematical calculations and into a discussion of what the military needs to do its job and keep troops safe while wars rage beyond our borders.

He warned: “The long arc of history has shown clearly that when we are not at war, we are in an interwar period.”

Eyre said applying peacetime processes and mindsets will not work “in this pre-war and, in some cases, wartime environment.”

“The question needs to change from ‘Why should we invest in defence if the money cannot be spent?’ to ‘What can we do for the good of the nation to help rapidly convert the funds into capabilities?'” he said.

No doubt somewhere in the back of his mind was the memory of Kandahar in 2006, when Canadian troops rode on Dutch Chinooks that Canada had sold at the end of the Cold War as part of the so-called “peace dividend.” There were not enough helicopters then, and the Canadians had to rely on their lightly armored G-Wagons and LAV-3s.

Today, Canadian and other NATO troops sit in Latvia, staring across the border at Russian soldiers.

The Canadian army was deployed in Eastern Europe without dedicated air and missile defense systems and had no means of repelling drone attacks. It was equipped with ancient anti-tank weapons and a supply of artillery ammunition that would only last for a few days in a real battle.

The Department of National Defense (DND) is trying to meet this need for equipment, but some of these critical systems have yet to be ordered and will not be delivered for months.

If the nation has already been traumatised by the 158 deaths in Afghanistan – a guerrilla war – it is not difficult to imagine the shock and grief that a conventional war along the lines of Ukraine would provoke in a public that likes to talk about war in abstract terms.

As she took command this week, Carignan – also an Afghanistan war veteran – made it clear that she knows time is short.

She said the country had five years to prepare for anything authoritarian regimes in Russia or China might throw at us.